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My Amazon S3 Moment

Last week I decided to dive into a new project of my own creation. Part of the project entailed re-using code I had already created, so I was very excited about it. One of my 2017 New Year’s resolutions was to create code that I would be able to re-use in other modules or projects, so I welcomed the opportunity.

Some re-usable code was related to cross-browser hacks for input ranges. I had already done quite a bit of research on the topic for my Custom HTML5 video player, and the code was pretty much complete. So I went to my Github profile and clicked on the link to the custom-html5-video-player gh-pages website. All the styling was gone! I was in a panic. There was a high probability that potential employers, team mates, or colleagues had visited the repository in this condition. Why did it happen, and what could I do to mitigate the severity of the situation? I looked over all the code and didn’t find anything at first. Then I had a sneaking suspicion that it might have had something to do with my custom favicon. I looked over the markup of the index.html for the custom player. Then the following stared at me in the face:

Were you able to catch it at first glance? I didn’t close the link tag. The > was missing. I immediately added it and pushed the change to Github. So if you visited my Custom HTML5 Video Player repo on Github in the past couple of weeks, there was no styling because I had experienced my first AmazonS3 moment, as I like to term it.

Perhaps the Amazon S3 outage was a result of one site hosting too much of the internet, but in my case it was one person adding a favicon to too many projects in one fell swoop, and trying to get it done as quickly as possible. What did I learn? Don’t do it so quickly. Break up the tedious task into smaller chunks. Most important, don’t rush, no matter how much others want or expect you to. One has to find a balanced middle ground. Trying to race to the finish more often than not results in falling behind. Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare?

Please do visit the repository now, as the issue has been fixed, and I am very proud of this project. I even added a couple of tweaks to make the visuals even more appealing. Thanks in advance for your patience and understanding!

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Maria Campbell

Founder, Inter-Global Media Network, Inc., where I focus on Front End Development. as well as a digital photographer, videographer, blogger, broadcaster, and graphic designer. Genesis Framework user. I got my start 8+ years ago teaching myself HTML/CSS and Wordpress Development because I couldn't find anyone who could create what I wanted. I have been working with open source software ever since. I am an open source software evangelist, and a "Women in Technology" evangelist. A creative professional myself, I find Web Development to be both practical and creative. I love to cook, travel, read mysteries, love everything French, the beach at sunrise, my three cats, and hope to revisit the city of San Francisco one day.

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